Dutch police to register sympathisers of Kurdish separatist PKK

Dutch police are planning to register the names of Dutch Turks who sympathise with the Kurdish separatist movement PKK in their official computer system, the Telegraaf said on Tuesday.

The organisation is on the EU’s official terror list and the police have now had a series of ‘secret’ meetings about the movement and the communist DHKP-C, the Telegraaf said.

Some people are concerned that Dutch police officers of Turkish origin could pass the information on to Ankara, which launched a major crackdown on the PKK last week, the paper said.

However, a spokesman for Amsterdam police told the Telegraaf that the force had confidence in the ‘strict rules to guarantee police officer integrity’.

Meanwhile, several dozen Turkish nationals have applied for asylum in the Netherlands in the wake of the failed military coup, the paper said, in a separate report.

Immigration service figures show 63 Turks applied for refugee status in August, compared with 46 in the whole of 2015. A spokesman could not confirm if Ankara’s crackdown on coup supporters had played a part but said ‘it is not inconceivable’, the paper said.

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